The meeting last night to introduce CF Grassroots Progressive Resource Center and livestream Bernie Sanders was a big success. On such short notice, it was gratifying to see how many took time out of their busy lives to attend. It shows a real pent-up feeling and need for us to organize in order to combat the negative and dangerous agenda coming from Washington. As Bernie said in his excellent address, despair is not an option now. We need to shake it off and work with other groups in an efficient and powerful manner to fight the extremist agenda being enacted rapidly in Washington by Congress and the President.

There was a fantastic movie on WUCF last Tuesday about Rachel Carson, author of “Silent Spring,” the book that ignited the environmental movement over 50 years ago. Until Ms. Carson’s book came out, we lived blissfully ignorant of the real dangers of chemical pesticides. We learned through her investigations that poisoning certain undesirable creatures is not done in a vacuum and has negative consequences all the way up the food chain, eventually harming us. Consequently, we became less naive about trusting the corporations pushing their products and the government in charge of regulating them.

President Kennedy acknowledged the importance of the book and a long, slow journey began to outlaw DDT in this country and put into place stronger governmental safeguards to our health and environment. Far from perfect, the advances made should be built upon and strengthened not thrown out and eviscerated as is feverishly being done by the new administration. However, we’re in a new era, with seemingly no remembrance of history and an arrogant boastfulness of using “alternative facts.” The same guilty corporations from the past are taking advantage of our ignorance with a new leader determined to sell our environment out to the highest bidder.

In this brave new world of “alternative facts,” Jesus must be proud of his spokesman. Backing up the Trump administrations’ edict to State Department employees to either “get with the program or….go”, Father Philip Pizzo, a New York Catholic priest, upped the ante and had these holy words of wisdom for Trump protestors on his facebook page.

The news keeps getting worse from this administration. Trump’s executive order Friday banned citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for the next 90 days and suspends admission of all refugees for the next 120 days. A federal judge granted an emergency stay Saturday night “for people who have already arrived in the United States and those who are in transit, and who hold valid visas, ruling they can legally enter the country.” However, this action, as well as others, has put the world into turmoil. Protests are scheduled throughout the nation, including in Orlando tomorrow.

Check out Facebook for more info on local demonstration of solidarity:

Now that the marches, which were such a resounding success, are but a memory, we’ll need everyone’s help on a regular basis to keep the resistance movement alive and “Make America Great Again.” Strange, how that phrase has been perverted, but it’s remarkably true now in defense of what’s going down in Washington. They’re moving quickly to dismember many of the governmental agencies that support us as citizens and make us safe. Move.On.org will be one of the groups battling to safeguard our hard-fought advances in civil liberties, and environmental and human health. Many organizations, especially legal organizations since that’s the language this administration is most conversant in, must be geared up to push back against overreach and the alternative facts employed proudly now by our representatives in the federal government. Please view MoveOn.org’s video, below, for a snippet of their plan and get involved any way you can with whatever organizations you feel most passionate about. In this crisis, it’s our patriotic duty to resist.